[Mike Nolan]

The debate over active dry yeast (ADY) vs instant yeast (IDY) is interesting. Here's some history on commercial yeast.

Compressed yeast cakes were developed in the 1800's by the Fleischmann brothers. Before that, bakers generally used sourdough or 'old dough' to seed their dough with yeast, or got liquid yeast from beer brewers.

When it was first introduced during WW II, active dry yeast always needed to be proofed in warm water, but ADY has improved over the years. Many bakers now state that they don't bother to proof their ADY, but the yeast manufacturers still recommend it.

Instant dry yeast was developed in the 1990's and does not need to be proofed, it can just be mixed in with the flour.

These days cake yeast is hard to find, I've seen it in the freezer section at the grocery store but I've also been told that freezing yeast cakes kills off a lot of the yeast. ADY and IDY can both be frozen, I've know of bakers who had IDY that had been in the freezer for five or more years and still worked fine. Large commercial bakers buy liquid yeast in 1 gallon containers, but it has a very short shelf life and isn't available to home bakers.

I generally use Fleischmann's IDY which I buy in 1 pound packages at Sams Club. In all the baking I've done, the only recipe that didn't work well with IDY was James Beard's Monkey Bread recipe, from "Beard on Bread", a classic book on bread baking and one that has been ranked as the favorite book on bread by several generations of bakers. It worked much better with ADY.

Ive got some SAF Gold osmotolerant yeast, which is designed for sweet dough recipes, but I haven't tried making Monkey Bread with it yet. Sugar is hygroscopic, meaning it attracts water, so, like salt, it can inhibit yeast growth. Recipes that have more than 6% sugar by bakers weight (eg, compared to the flour weight) are ones that can see sugar inhibit yeast growth by depriving it of the water it needs to grow.

[Mike Nolan]

Commercial proof boxes are usually set somewhere between 80 and 90 degrees and at 80% humidity.

Studies have shown that yeast actually grows fastest at about 102 degrees and a humid environment also encourages yeast growth because yeast needs moisture to grow.

But speed isn't necessarily the primary goal when making bread; the faster your yeast grows, the less time there is for the enzymes in your dough to act upon it, enhancing flavor. So it always comes down to a trade off between time and flavor.

In a commercial bakery, time is money, and keeping to a predictable schedule is important, it's expensive to have bakers standing around waiting for their dough to rise. Temperature, humidity and barometric pressure change from day to day, proof boxes help keep things on schedule.

[Mike Nolan]

Yes, welcome back Mike.

[Mike Nolan]

I find one of the most important steps in making bread is the 5-15 minute bench rest between scaling/preshaping and final shaping. That makes final shaping easier and definitely makes for a higher final loaf.

Another good book is Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman. He's the lead baker at King Arthur Flour and the book is written on a level somewhere in between home baking and commercial baking, though the recipes are all sized for home baking. The chapter on the various steps to making bread is very well written.

[Mike Nolan]

I definitely approach cooking with an engineering perspective. I make notes on nearly every recipe I try, often writing right in the book! When I'm trying to design a new recipe, I take more extensive notes in a lab book. (You'll find I often recommend people make notes on their recipes noting what worked and what didn't.)

A number of years back my wife gave me a recipe her mother had written for honey wheat bread. I had to adapt it quite a bit (it called for lard, among other things), but for several years it was our daily bread, and I made it at least once a week. These days we don't eat as much bread as we used to, and our younger son has moved to California, but I still make it about once a month. You can find it here: Honey Wheat Bread

I also mill my own whole wheat flour using a Nutrimill impact mill my older son gave me for Christmas about 6 years ago.

If your mixer is that old, it might be from the days when Hobart owned Kitchaid. (Look on the band around the mixer and see if it says 'Hobart' on it.) Mine is the one we got as a wedding present in 1972 and it's still working great. If so, it's a real work horse of a machine, most people think the quality of KA mixers went down after the company was sold in the early 90's, though it appears to have gone back up in the last few years. If mine died, I'd be in a quandary, because I also have the pasta maker attachment. I'd probably buy the bottom-of-the line KA mixer for things like pasta and whipping egg whites but I'd look very hard into a something like an Ankarsrum or Bosch mixer for breadmaking, or maybe even a 12 quart table-top commercial mixer, though that'd be overkill.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

For lunch today I took some of the chicken noodle soup I made the other day and added some sauteed mushrooms. Definitely perked it up a bit, and I made a note to add mushrooms to the 3 quarts of it that I froze.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

I know from experience that you can cut salt down to about 1% by baker's weight (eg, relative to the weight of the flour) before you start to notice any significant effects or difference in taste.

I've made Tuscan bread a few times, it is salt free. It's pretty bland and tends to be very airy, because there's no salt to inhibit the yeast. I've eaten in a Tuscan restaurant, the bread is meant to be dipped in spicy sauces.

[Mike Nolan]

No, I'm not a food industry professional, I'm what most people would call a serious home baker, though in the past 4 years I have taken a week-long class in pastry making (pies, tarts, turnovers, etc) at the San Francisco Baking Institute and a week-long class in chocolate at the Chocolate Academy in Chicago. Both classes were Christmas presents from my sons.

By training I'm an engineer/computer analyst, with a BS in Computer Science from Northwestern and an MBA from Nebraska. I retired in 2016 after a 43 year career as a computer programmer, systems analyst and database manager.

I first learned to bake from my sister when I was about 9, helping her make bread and cinnamon rolls. But I didn't do much baking until about 24 years ago, when we got a bread machine. It took me about 6 years to outgrow the bread machine in terms of what I like to bake, these days most of my breads are kneaded in a Kitchenaid mixer.

About 15 years ago I started doing most of the cooking for our family, because I was telecommuting/working from home and my wife works at the University of Nebraska.

Last year I joined the Bread Baker's Guild of America, they have a lower membership rate for student/home bakers. I'm hoping to take some BBGA classes later this year.

Because of my engineering training, I'm something of an experimenter in the kitchen.

[Mike Nolan]

I haven't bought chicken stock in years, I just cut up a chicken, throw it in the pot to simmer, add aromatics and veggies (parsnips are a must!) and in a few hours I've got 5-6 quarts of chicken stock ready to be strained, plus boiled chicken ready for chicken soup or chicken salad. Leaving out the salt is no problem.

A new meat market in town can get chicken backs, but I'd have to buy a 40 pound box of them, at around 65 cents/pound. That'd make 4-8 large batches of stock, and I should be able to freeze them in 5 or 10 pound lots, ready to make the next batch. If you roast the chicken bones before simmering them, you get brown chicken stock, not usually used for soup but excellent when cooking and for sauces.

[Mike Nolan]

With my wife's allergies to garlic, red raspberries, curry and saffron (and probably a few I've forgotten to mention), eating out has been a challenge for years. During our Disney family vacation over Christmas whenever we went to eat my wife would have to check with the wait staff and often the chef came out to discuss what there was on the menu she could eat. I have to say that the Disney restaurants did a very good job trying to accommodate her, one of them even made a garlic-free version of their lobster mac and cheese for her.

[Mike Nolan]

Peter Reinhart has written several books on baking (I have at least 6 of them), and is a teacher of baking science at Johnson and Wales University in North Carolina. His book "The Bread Baker's Apprentice" won the James Beard Award for best cookbook. I helped test several of the recipes in his "Artisan Breads Every Day" book.

One of these years I hope to make it to the Asheville Bread Festival, where Peter is one of the regular lecturers. I've exchanged a number of emails with him, but haven't met him in person.

[Mike Nolan]

One slice of store-bought bread can contain 175-250 mg of sodium in it, depending upon the brand. That means just the bread in a sandwich can make up 1/3 of my daily sodium allowance.

So far I'm trying to stay well below the daily maximum on sodium, because a primary reason for the sodium and fluid limits is to reduce the amount of water in my body. In a week I've lost about 10 pounds, and I suspect virtually all of that is water weight.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm not sure organic flours are any better than ones that aren't certified as organic.

My daughter-in-law had a problem with wheat that caused her to break out in rashes, but she can control it with medications. But when she's here I try to minimize cooking and baking with wheat flour. She doesn't have a problem with rye or barley.

Doctors used to label all the wheat allergies as Celiac disease, but there are at least five different types of allergies or reactions to wheat products, and wheat is also suspected as being a trigger food for children with ADHD.

[Mike Nolan]

My potassium has been at the low end of normal, but if I start eating a lot more fresh fruits and vegetables, it should be fine. (I've been having a banana as my afternoon snack.)

I'm not really fond of squash or pumpkin. I did make spaghetti squash with meatballs several times this fall, but I'll have to start making my own low-salt marinara, the canned/jarred stuff is way too high in salt. Even most canned tomatoes have a lot of added salt. I didn't see any no-salt tomatoes at the store, I'm sure I can find them but they'll almost certainly be in small cans at a high price.

I do have a number of quart containers of frozen tomato sauce I made last summer, no salt in it yet.

In the summertime I can make ratatouille, which uses eggplant, summer squash and zucchini, but that's not something I usually make in the winter and I'll need to change my recipe, because I usually start by sweating the moisture out of the vegetables by salting them after they've been peeled and sliced.

[Mike Nolan]

The only rice cooker I have experience with is my Zojirushi, which is a full-size rice maker that can make a LOT of rice, though I seldom make much more than a small batch, because my wife doesn't eat much rice because of the carbs.

This is one of those set-it-and-forget-it cookers, no dials, just a switch to start the cooking cycle. The way it determines cooking time is by measuring the temperature, until the water boils off or is absorbed into the rice there's a limit on how hot it can get.

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